Photoshop is obviously the tool of choice for (I would guess) the vast majority of photographers. I spent years in Paint Shop Pro and finally made the upgrade to CS3 in August '08. For me, it is pretty indispensible now. However, the latest upgrade to CS4 has proved to be a mixed blessing. One of my favourite new features is (I'll call it) the "Curve Nudge" feature, where you can adjust a curve from the actual pixel on the photo. However, CS4 also retains some of my pet hates of CS3 and seems to introduce some new problems too.

Occasionally, the crop and clone tools seem to make an error with co-ordinates. E.g. Clone will randomly clone an area of the photo, perhaps a large line even away from the cursor. Crop sometimes seems to expand its box to twice the width or height. The Clone problem seems to happen quite often to the point where it gets irritating. I'm surprised there is no fix for this. However, apart form these issues, the software seems very solid and stable.

I wish Adobe would make a few improvements to the software, but these can be largely summed up in one sentence: I'm running on a 1920x1200 display, 24" monitor - why are the dialogs so small? It is a pity that there is not an option to increase the size of the UI (or even enlarge these dialogs), especially for curves and histogram, where an adjustment of a few pixels makes a difference. Maybe I'm being too fussy and should just buy a bigger monitor...